One proven way B2B firms are scaling revenue is by evolving how they think about inside sales pipeline generation. But even if you know the best practices that guarantee outbound callingsuccess, executing them is another matter. To do inside sales right requires expertise and resources that you might not have right now.
Even if your ultimate goal is to hire a superstar inside sales team, this will take time—not to mention you’ll have to invest in establishing accurate sales metrics to help talent continuously improve, as well as create a career progression scheme to retain them.
Instead of burdening your employees with tasks they don’t have the bandwidth to handle or worrying about hiring and retention, the right solution may be to place your inside sales program in the hands of a highly qualified external telemarketing firm.
Top-notch outsourced sales teams already have the correct metrics and a built-in progression scheme to improve performance and hit the ground running. They can also work closely with your in-house team to support and train your salespeople in taking an active role in pipeline acceleration efforts.
How to choose the right B2B inside sales partner
Of course, you can’t sign on with just any firm. Partnering with a company that specializes in inside sales is a common path for sales growth—but it only works when that external support comes ready with the resources you need to expedite the lengthy process of finding qualified leads.
Here are three must-have qualities that top inside sales vendors have in common: the right focus, the right skill set, and the right sales reps.
1. Focus on quality, not quantity
Before you join forces with a vendor to do targeted inside sales, determine if the focus is on obtaining the right contacts rather than any contact at all. The company should be reaching out to decision-makers whose needs align with what you can give them. If all the vendor can promise is to put you in touch with people, the result will be a great deal of time wasted on the wrong prospects.
Many vendors exclusively emphasize appointment setting. Their main value-add is the number of meetings they can secure for you within a short time frame. Beyond that, their involvement ends. But meetings, no manner how numerous, don’t mean much if you don’t eventually convert them into sales.
2. Take the time to do things right
Engaging the most suitable and qualified leads is a lengthy, meticulous process, and you should never settle for a rushed job.
This means the relationship with your vendor should be far from transactional. From the get-go, a great inside sales partner should be carefully researching prospects and their own database to identify sales opportunities you may not even be aware of.
Nor should the collaboration end after the appointment-setting is done. In the interest of learning from both your victories and misses, the best inside sales support teams conduct a post-mortem on both appointments and sales cycles to gather enough intel to form a full picture of what worked and what didn’t, arming you with enough information to approach new prospects and uninterested leads with a far more appealing package.
3. Use onshore sales development representatives (SDRs)
It’s important for the inside sales vendor you choose to employ highly qualified personnel who intimately understand your product and your target market. They will be your prospect’s first point of contact, so it’s crucial that your pipeline development function operates like an extension of your team as much as it can.
First impressions matter and cultural alignment is key. The uncomfortable reality is that the most effective inside sales callers must be onshore and from a similar cultural background to the prospects, they are calling.
US prospects are barraged by dozens of calls daily from offshore centers, and every time they answer the phone, their guard is up. Not only will onshore SDRs be on the same cultural wavelength as you and your prospects, but they’ll also be more accessible and much closer to your product than someone halfway across the world.
After all, a great inside salesperson may be endowed with a silver tongue and the gift of the gab, but it won’t matter what he or she says if it isn’t resonating with your buyers.
